Xilinx rolls out 7-Series FPGA design kits and DSP reference platform

Xilinx has announced availability of the first design kits and Targeted Design Platform (TDP) for the company's latest 28nm Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs. The kits were developed through a close partnership between Xilinx and their Alliance Members - 4DSP Inc., Analog Devices Inc., Avnet Electronics Marketing, Northwest Logic, MathWorks, Texas Instruments, and Xylon.

According to Mark Moran, Senior Marketing Manager at Xilinx, the kits that the company is announcing at the 2012 DesignCon are just the first of 40 that will be developed by the company and its partners.

The first three Xilinx Series 7 kits are:

The Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 Evaluation Kit for designing higher-level systems that employ DDR3, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express, and other serial connectivity standards. Communications features include high-speed GTX transceivers, with enhanced small form-factor pluggable (SFP+) and SubMiniature version A (SMA) connectors.

Price and availability: $1,695 order entry open now.

The Kintex-7 FPGA DSP Kit co-developed with Avnet Electronics Marketing features the Kintex-7 FPGA KC705 board and includes an integrated high-speed analog FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) to interface to real-world signals. The DSP Kit includes dual-channel 800 MSPS 16-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and dual-channel 250 MSPS 14-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), which designers can combine with the DSP48E1 arithmetic processing engines in the Kintex-7 FPGA. Data paths to and from the DSP slices can be created and integrated into systems using industry-standard AXI4 interface conventions.

Price and availability: $3,995 order entry now from Avnet.

The Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 Evaluation Kit gives designers of advanced systems with high performance and high bandwidth connectivity requirements a starting point for evaluating Virtex-7 FPGAs, which require 50 percent less power than previous generation devices.

Price and availability: $3,495 with order entry open late-February 2012.

To enable the addition of peripherals to the base Xilinx development boards, each kit supports the VITA 57 FMC specification for the industry standard daughter card form factor, connector and modular interface to the FPGA. The Xilinx Agile Mixed Signal (AMS) header is provided with all 7-Series kits, along with board design files, and a full seat of the Xilinx ISE Design Suite Logic Edition, locked to the on-board FPGA.